Fatal Fury Garou: Mark of the wolves (to give it it’s rather long full name) is a continuation of the 2d Beat em up series Fatal Fury by Japanese company SNK playmore (better known for other 2d fighter series King of Fighters and 2d shooter Metal Slug).
As such the story continues but jumps forward ten years to reveal an (almost) all new cast of fighters save for one fighter series lead Terry Bogard who himself has had a radical wardrobe change as well as a slight move set change, some of the new characters have similar fighting styles to older characters such as Kashnood Butt who was trained by Art of fighting’s lead star Ryo Sakazaki in Kyokugen and the sons of Fatal fury favourite, Taekwondo fighter Kim Kaphwan, while their styles may be similar to older fighters they are far from identical and are designed more to help veterans feel at home rather than out of laziness.
The story is (as normal) a weak part of fighting games and this is no exception, but here is a quick summary of the main story line of Garou.
Murderer of Terry's father and all round last boss bad guy Geese Howard has been dead now for ten years and a new leader has step forward to take his place his name is Kain, brother in law to Geese, Terry has been raising Geese’s orphaned Son Rock Howard, however Kain claims to have knowledge of Rock’s mother, which Rock sets out to find but to get this information he must enter the tournament and thus the loose premises for another round of excellent fighting begins.
Fatal Fury Garou: Mark of the wolves removes the two plane system of previous Fatal Fury titles (a system which allowed you to battle on both the foreground and background switching between them at the push of a button) in favour of a more traditional single plane approach, however Garou offers many new systems in it’s place, such as the new Tactical offensive position (T.O.P), which allows you to pick an area on your life gauge in which you will be given a boost to your attack power as well slight health recovery, also new is “Just defence” which grants you a small amount of health recovery if you can time a block to an enemy attack perfectly and making it’s usually appearance is the phenomena dubbed by the fans as “SNK Boss syndrome” with the games two boss Grant and Kain having a considerably high difficulty level on the higher difficulty settings.
Graphically at the time this effort pushed the Neogeo to the limit, and still is reasonably impressive today the animation is also excellent, the soundtrack is as normal for an SNK title very good.
Although this is and excellent example of how to do a 2d beat em up right it is not immune to the pitfalls that always come with this genre, the life span is very short it will take you no more than half and hour to complete the game once (a lot less if you are familiar with the genre) and game modes are lacking for single player with only Arcade and survival mode on offer, of course if you have a group of friends or Xbox live this game could potentially last you as long as you want (or at least until the community dries up in online’s case).
The only other faults are purely with the amount of time it took to reach us, when Fatal Fury Garou: Mark of the wolves first hit in Japan as mentioned above if featured a virtually whole new roster and as such the number of characters is not as high as other titles with only 14 to select but at least they where all new, fast forward to 2009 and a number of the characters (six) have since appeared in other games, leaving only eight new characters in Garou.
In spite of it’s (arguably unavoidable faults) this remain one of the best 2d fighters available and for 800 points you can’t really complain two much when Street fighter 2 is also 800 points and the HD remix is 1200, when this is in my view the better game.
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